


Under the Sign of the Dark

by DoreyG



Category: Frey & McGray Series - Oscar de Muriel
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, Frottage, Gay Club, Investigating a Crime in the Gay Community Leads to Feelings Reveal, M/M, Undercover as a Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:33:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28697010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoreyG/pseuds/DoreyG
Summary: “I’m not judging them, I’m just pointing out that they should be more careful.”“Ye sure?” He asked, throwing me a look that hovered somewhere between sceptical and curious. “Ye got yer judgy face on, is all I’m saying.”“Shutup, Nine Nails,” I snapped, and then hesitated. On any other day, in any other place, I would’ve probably left it at that or allowed it to escalate into another easy fight; but something about this club made me want to be impossibly daring for just once. “In some ways, I envy them.”
Relationships: Ian Frey/Adolphus "Nine Nails" McGray
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13
Collections: Bulletproof 20/21





	Under the Sign of the Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



I had no idea how I had got myself into this situation, but now I was desperately wondering if I could find any way out of it besides leaping to my feet and running screaming from the room.

It had started off, as all things did when McGray was involved, with a little bit of insanity. Apparently a ghost had been seen wandering the streets of the Edinburgh new town, a pale man with big eyes who wailed frequently for his lost love. I, being sensible, had immediately presented the possibility of it being an anemic drunk. McGray, being the polar opposite of sensible, had immediately vetoed me and thrown himself into research with what I considered to be a frankly undue level of enthusiasm.

Which had led, via so many deeply confusing turns that my head was still spinning, to the two of us going undercover in a club thoroughly influenced by the aesthetes. And not just as neutral observers of all the overwrought beauty and fine men and acts that really should be kept behind closed doors, no. As a _couple_.

I genuinely had no idea how McGray had managed to talk me into such an insane, and not a little shameful, idea but I only realised the full depths of it when we were already inside the club and rapidly removing myself from the situation had become a lot more difficult. We chatted casually, McGray pressing people for their stories of skeletons in the closet with a frankly ghoulish enthusiasm. We indulged in a few intimate touches, only for the purpose of keeping suspicion off our backs. We almost got made a few too many times, men narrowing their eyes at us cautiously and backing hastily out of the conversation the moment we looked anything close to what we actually were. And throughout I couldn’t stop my eyes from roaming the room, from fixating on all the pretty men there, from seeing what they were _doing_ to each other.

I had felt like my cheeks were about to burst into flames a thousand times, and so it was somewhat of a surprise when the end of the night came and I was not just ash floating away on the breeze. Was instead just myself, distracted and undeniably nervy, sitting on a secluded couch with McGray and staring out at the club.

“So,” McGray said eventually, and a brief sideways glance confirmed that he was looking at me with an intensity that had once been somewhat unsettling but that now seemed only natural.

I allowed myself to stare sideways at him for a moment more, and then transferred my own gaze back to the club. I looked at McGray every single day, after all, and even if a traitorous part of me was starting to want to look for longer and longer there were far more important things to see here. “So?”

McGray had never been all that comfortable with being ignored. He was like Tucker in that way, constantly wagging his tail and clambering all over you in search of his next treat. He leaned in closer to me, poked me in the side in his most annoying manner. “I get the sense that yer a bit uncomfortable with all of this.”

I cast him a sideways glare for that observation, and then forcibly reminded myself that I shouldn’t give him the satisfaction and turned my eyes quickly away again. “You may be right, for once.”

“Dinnae think ye were particularly religious,” he said, a calm observation instead of teasing, and I finally looked at him again with a frown at his words. He gave me one of his customary grins, the ridiculously large ones that I had found my eyes lingering on far too often lately, and elaborated: “ye ken, obsessed with this sorta thing being a sin an’ all that.”

“I’m not, I’m not sure that I ever have been, and I don’t think that it’s a sin,” I answered him levelly, and held his gaze for a long moment. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the fact that I’d drunk rather too much whisky, but suddenly I felt like extending a few confidences. “It’s just… Well, you can't deny that this is all a bit _improper_.”

“Improper?” McGray crowed, and his voice rose up to a gleeful peak. “Seriously, Percy, _that’s_ your only problem with it?”

I glared at him afresh, well aware that he had not only just blown our cover but gone so far as to drive a damned locomotive through it. “Keep your voice down!”

“Come on, nobody here at the moment is paying any real attention to us anymore,” McGray said, obviously amused, and gestured to the rest of the club. Unfortunately, to my considerable annoyance, he was right; the evening had moved far beyond the chatting and mingling stage, and now couples were strewn across the room in various stages of undress and.absorption. “As a matter of fact, and I’m sure I’ll surprise ye here, I dinnae think it’s particularly improper.”

“Well, you have strange standards.” I sniffed in my most superior tone, which for some reason made a big grin spread across his face. “You at least have to admit that this sort of thing, grinding against another man in a public place for heaven’s sake, is a little outside of the norm.”

“Only reluctantly,” McGray said, for once somewhat placidly. If it wasn’t for the grin on his face, the wide baring of his teeth that made him look almost intolerably mischievous, you would’ve thought that he was arguing his point earnestly. “The way I see it, what people are doing in this club is only the slightest bit different from what people do with prozzies in alleyways every single day of the year. And, for that matter, only the slightest bit different from what people do in marriage beds either.”

I was willing to allow him the prostitution point, albeit aware that I would’ve couched it in far less offensive wording, but I was somewhat appalled by him bringing the institution of marriage into it. “You cannot be serious.”

“Why not?” McGray asked, and perhaps I had been wrong. Despite his worrying grin, which transformed his face and made it far too handsome, there was an odd earnestness in his eyes as if he genuinely hoped to convince me of his point. “It’s just people trying to find a connection, sometimes just physical but sometimes a genuine emotional bond. I’m not gonna judge them for that, and neither should ye; not when we both ken just how shitty the world can be.”

I shifted uncomfortably, not liking that characterisation of myself. I wasn’t entirely sure why, I hadn’t flinched before when McGray had accused me of being a judgemental prick with his head up his arse (his exact wording, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear). “I’m not judging them, I’m just pointing out that they should be more careful.”

“Ye sure?” He asked, throwing me a look that hovered somewhere between sceptical and curious. “Ye got yer judgy face on, is all I’m saying.”

“Shut _up_ , Nine Nails,” I snapped, and then hesitated. On any other day, in any other place, I would’ve probably left it at that or allowed it to escalate into another easy fight; but something about this club made me want to be impossibly daring for just once. “In some ways, I envy them.”

If McGray had been properly drinking, instead of idly swirling the whisky that he had brought at the beginning of the night, he would’ve probably spat it out. Instead he almost dropped the glass, and spun around to stare at me with wide eyes and an honest to god gawp. There was a long moment of wide eyed wonder, before he blinked and very slowly leant forwards to place his half full glass on the table in front of us.

“I mean, of course I don’t envy them their rather dingy club…” I said, pleased to have wrong-footed him but rather nervous in the face of his silence. “But I do envy them their courage, the fact that they’re actually willing to go out and find a connection instead of accepting loneliness forever. They’re better than me, in some ways: I’ve never even tried.”

McGray’s eyes narrowed a little, and I braced myself. But he didn’t seem angry, or even especially inclined to mock. Instead he seemed a little confused and decidedly curious. “Ye were engaged, weren’t ye?”

“Yes, and then she ran off with my hated older brother at very short notice. Which I think says a lot for the general state of the relationship.” I sniffed, surprised to find that it wasn’t as painful a memory as it had once been. It was true, Eugenia and I had never been all that well suited. “Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I’ve gone through life like a ghost; never truly touching anyone, and never even being brave enough to try.”

There was another long moment of silence. The hysterical part of me, as McGray would term it, expected him to denounce me as a sodomite and storm off into the night without a single glance back. The cynical part of me expected him to start teasing at any moment, to hold this over my head with glee for the rest of our lives. The realistic part of me expected him to finally down his drink, and then ever so reasonably suggest that we go ghost hunting again.

Instead, to my profound shock, he eventually let out a long and ragged sigh and shifted just the slightest bit closer to me on our battered couch. “Sometimes I feel a bit like that too.”

I gawped at him, my mind frantically trying to catch up with the fact that he was sympathising with me instead of denouncing me or teasing me or deeming me less important than his latest idiotic obsession. “Are you serious?”

“Ever since my parents died, yeah,” he said, and his expression was far more solemn than usual. For all of his usual garrulousness, his obvious love of the sound of his own voice, I had rarely heard him talk about his family so openly. “I have a lotta people that I’m friendly with, and also a fair few who would be willing to share my bed with or without friendliness, but sometimes I feel like I’m just moving through life without a purpose. Always just the brutish Scotsman, solving everybody else’s problems because maybe if I do I’ll feel a little less alone.”

The fact that he was willing to bare so much, just for me, left a strange feeling fluttering in my stomach. I licked my lips delicately, swallowed hard when his eyes dropped to them. “Nine Nails…”

“No need for sympathy, Percy, most of the time I just get on with it without dwelling overmuch on the subject.” He tilted his head back briefly to look at the ceiling, as if gathering himself, and then glanced back at me with a resolute and faintly nervous expression on his face. “It was all fairly easy, until I met you.”

I blinked at him, wrong footed again. In all the world, I think that we were the only two people able to shake each other quite so much. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean that it was fairly easy to ignore that I wanted a connection, until I met somebody who I actually wanted to connect with.” His eyes remained steady on my face now, still nervous but determined. It was always something that I’d reluctantly admired about McGray, how once he had made his decision he would stick to it come hell or high water. “At first I thought it was just annoyance, and _then_ I thought it was just a profound desire to strangle ye. And then I realized that it was neither of those two things: that I wanted to spend time in yer company, that I wanted to pick yer brain about things, that I wanted to make ye happy even when ye were determined to sulk. There’s nobody like ye, Percy, and we’re well matched in that if nothing else.”

It was the most passionate declaration that I’d ever received, far more passionate than any words that’d ever crossed Eugenia’s lips. I found myself powerless in the face of it, boggling uncertainly as I absorbed the fact that one of us had finally spoken the truth: that we did matter to each other, that we’d mattered to each other in one way or another from the very moment that we’d met.

“Can ye deny it?” McGray asked, his tone a challenge but his eyes terribly uncertain. McGray was hardly an insecure man, but even a confident person can be hard pressed in the face of such silence. I felt a brief and ridiculous pang of guilt, for doing such a thing to him.

“I should bloody well hope so!” I tried to hide the guilt behind offence, but it was perhaps the weakest effort that I’d ever managed. Somehow, sat here in this smoky club with couples all around us and McGray so very warm at my side, I felt far less inclined to denial than usual. “But the true question is, laying my capabilities in this arena aside, do I actually _want_ to deny it?”

I had seen McGray hopeful before, but never as intensely as this; his eyes glowed, his lips twitched, he drew in a sharp breath as if I had just struck him. It was agonising to watch, and absolutely beautiful to see. “Well?”

“No,” I said softly, and in that moment probably sealed my fate. It felt final, but far less terrifying than it should’ve done. “I know what you mean. Against all the odds, I feel rather undeniably connected to you too. At first, as you said, I thought it was just annoyance. And then, about the time you broke my nose, I thought it was hatred… But you’re right, I don’t think that it’s anything as negative as that. We’re perfectly matched, in a strange way. And I don’t think that I’ve ever met anybody I could say that about before.”

The hope was growing more and more by the second, developing into a downright glee that shouldn’t have left me weak at the knees but that most certainly did. “So you admit that I’m right _twice_ in one night?”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” I said, probably far too late. For some reason, I pretended to myself that I didn’t know exactly what it was, I minded far less than I ever had before. “I’m not saying that we have a connection like the people in this club do, after all. Nowhere close.”

“True, true,” McGray said. And then, to my disbelief, very slowly reached out and placed one big warm hand firmly on my knee. “Unless you’d like to change that?”

The conversation had obviously been heading in that direction, even somebody who wasn’t a detective could’ve seen it from miles off, but I still found myself frozen. As I stared at him, torn, two paths stretched out before me in equal detail. I could shake his hand off now, leave the club without a backwards glance, and ignore this the next morning and all the mornings after until we both forgot about it entirely. Or…

“I don’t think we’re going to get anything else here tonight, not when all these folk are far too wrapped up in their own connections to pay any attention to us,” McGray continued, his tone soft and ragged and so wonderfully intense. For a moment I thought that he was just going to lift his hand and cup me there for the whole world to see, for a moment I thought that I would let him. “Come back to mine with me?”

The moment of decision came… and went, in one long and faintly giddy breath. In the end it hadn’t even been close, in the end I would’ve probably allowed him to drag me to his bed the very moment I’d entered Edinburgh and glimpsed his battered face. “Alright.”

\--

McGray checked that George and Joan were in bed, together: which never failed to make me feel a little strange, and then snuck me through one of the back doors into his library. I got the sense that he was doing this as a sop to my finer emotions, that if he’d had the chance he would’ve thrown me over his shoulder like a caveman and carried me through his front door for the whole world to see.

I had expected to be taken straight through to his bedroom, and the flouting of that expectation was yet another thing that unsettled me. We sat in silence on his couch for a long few moments, both of us staring into space and both of us faintly uncertain. We had gone this far, but nothing irrevocable had happened yet. We could both walk away from this, pretend it’d never happened.

But McGray had never been the type of person to walk away from a bad idea. After a long few moments of silence he slapped his thighs, turned to me with that expression of determination back on his face. “...So!”

I looked at him, even though I shouldn’t have. I saw the stubble on his cheeks, the roughness of his features, the faintly terrifying intensity in his eyes. I looked and looked, and finally allowed myself to acknowledge him as an attractive man. “So?”

I had been expecting a bit of seduction, at least a little buttering up, but McGray had correctly judged that I was far past the need for that. Instead he leant in right away, almost before the word had left my mouth, and sealed our lips together with a desperation that should’ve been terrifying but that was instead strangely flattering.

I hesitated for a bare second, but couldn’t deny that he had been absolutely right about me. Soon I was leaning into the kiss eagerly, sliding my hands up into his wild hair and even opening my mouth for him when he swiped his tongue along the seam of my lips. It quickly grew beyond anything chaste or innocent or tentative, soon his arms were wrapped firmly around my body and his tongue was downright fucking into my mouth.

All of that considered, it was really no surprise when he groaned against me and surged forward in one incredibly smooth movement. I had a moment of disorientation, one that I wasn’t nearly as worried by as I should be, and then I was flat on my back with his big body stretched above me. I didn’t hesitate for even a moment, I only spread my legs for him and allowed him to settle eagerly down between my thighs.

I was already closer to him than I had been to any other human being, and I wondered if he knew that. Even if he did, because he was a remarkably observant man even when chasing after multiple insanities, he hardly seemed inclined to restrain himself. He pinned me down against the couch eagerly, continuing to ravage my mouth, and before long even started to move his hips. We ground together eagerly, and the position should’ve been slightly awkward but was instead _divine_.

It was somewhat of a surprise, this time, when McGray broke away from our embrace with a muffled curse, but his intentions soon became clear. He sat back on his haunches, the movement making his muscles ripple powerfully, and started to eagerly tear off his clothes. First his jacket, and then his shirt and undershirt, and then moving awkwardly down to his shoes and socks, and then his trousers and underthings until he was entirely naked astride me. His lack of care should’ve probably been annoying, it most certainly wasn’t.

I sat up from my prone position, and reached out to touch his bare chest. It was incredibly impressive, covered in whorls of dark hair and muscular in a way that spoke highly of his relentless energy. I was dry mouthed in the face of it, aroused in a way that I’d never once been before.

McGray tolerated my awed groping for a long moment, I’m sure it was such a hardship for him, and then reached out to grab my wrist and guide my hand back to my own body. There was a moment of confusion, and then I took the hint. I stripped quickly and efficiently myself, with a little more care for my clothing than McGray had shown but still with a palpable eagerness. I didn’t even fold my trousers, as I drew them down my thighs, I just kept going and going until I was just as naked as him.

He stared at me for a long moment once I was done, a gratifying level of awe clear in his eyes, and then leant surely in again. The briefest brush of flesh against flesh would’ve been enough to drive me out of my mind, but it was far more than the briefest brush. He pressed me back to the couch entirely, took my mouth in another brutal kiss and started to grind down against me again with a certain sense of purpose.

Dear God, it is hard to describe the glorious sensation of so much skin against skin. I moaned against his mouth, before I even thought about it, and reached up my hands to claw desperately at his wide shoulders. It wasn’t long before we managed to roll ourselves into a proper rhythm, as in tune as we’d always been.

I had never touched another man’s cock before, but I was most certainly doing so now. McGray’s cock, which felt as impressive as it had looked, kept grinding against my stomach and hip eagerly. He had already been half hard when he had kissed me again, naked this time, and that quickly grew to full hardness as he ground down against me. Obviously he was undone by this thing between us as I was, and even through the heat of my arousal I managed to feel a little smug at that.

Our rhythm was rough and ready, but absolutely perfect for the both of us. I had thought of pleasure as something easily defined, something that I could just put in a box and pull out when I needed it, but this coupling was proving me steadily more wrong by the moment. I quickly grew to hardness too, and could somehow feel the flare of arousal not just between my thighs but all the way through the rest of me too. This aimless grinding was already enough to drive me out of my mind with lust, to make me feel mad with all the possibilities stretching out before us.

McGray soon started to move with more purpose, that purpose obviously being to drive me entirely out of my mind and leave only glorious emptiness behind. He deliberately angled his hips, so that his cock at first brushed more firmly against the tender skin of my hips and then dipped in until it was rubbing against my own cock. They were just brief and glancing touches, much as you’d expect from two grown men not particularly known for their delicacy, but… Dear god, if they weren’t _glorious_.

I had hoped to keep some dignity through this encounter, maybe just enough that I could turn in McGray’s direction with a wryly arched eyebrow at the end and demand why he hadn’t shown me more, but that soon became impossible. The feeling of his big body braced above me was incredible, the feeling of his proportionally big cock grinding down against me even more so. I already felt like I was on fire, desperate gasps tearing from my throat as I lost myself more and more in the movement of our bodies. 

The one mercy was that if I was lost, McGray was right there with me. I could hear his breathing rasping loud and desperate in my ear, could feel the way that he clutched at me with such force that I was sure I’d have bruises in the morning. His thrusts steadily picked up speed, until he was downright fucking down against me. I don’t think that I’ve ever inspired such passion in one of my partners, such an unrelenting desire to take me apart entirely.

I groaned, somehow feeling reassured enough to show how desperate I was myself, and wriggled one of my legs out from under him. I had never done this before, of course I hadn’t because I’d never actually _bedded_ anybody before, but it was simply a matter of following my instincts. I wrapped it tightly around his broad back, and used the leverage to drag him even closer.

He swore against my mouth, so desperately that I found myself smiling smugly at the sound of it, and pushed himself up on one elbow. For a moment I wasn’t sure what on earth he had planned, but for once McGray’s reluctance to hang around proved decidedly to my advantage. He wormed his rough hand between our bodies, and wrapped it around both of our cocks at once.

His grip was at first far harsher than I would’ve used on myself, and then far too gentle. It took him a long few moments to get a grasp that had a chance of pleasing both of us, and even then it was slightly awkward. His arm was jammed awkwardly between our bodies, his palm was at first too slick with sweat to get an adequate grip and we were both decidedly too desperate to even think of drawing back and finding a far more logical path through this.

Somehow, though, none of that mattered. I had already been hard, and I grew all the harder under his faintly awkward touch. I found myself obsessed with the heat of his body, the rough callouses on his palm as he ran it over me. I found myself obsessed with _him_... But hadn’t that always been the case, in the end? Even when I had thought that I’d hated him, which seemed almost in another lifetime now, I had still wanted all of his attention with a ferocity that I’d never experienced before.

Before long he figured out a way to actually move his hand, and from there we were flying. He didn’t particularly hang around to experiment, we were both rather too desperate for that, but rather plunged in with a determination that took my breath away. His body continued to move on top of mine, big and brutish and dominating me entirely, but his entire attention was focused on the movement of his hand between us. Before as long he was just as rough as before, not exactly uncaring but instead brutally determined to please.

I shouldn’t have been pleased, I generally used a gentler touch when I was alone in my bed, but I couldn’t deny that I most certainly was. I bucked up against him, and let out another desperate groan into his mouth. A moan soon followed, and was rapidly succeeded by a trail of desperate whimpers. I was undone by him, and in that moment I would’ve been happy to be used by him in any way he saw fit.

He increased the speed of his hand between us, driving onwards and onwards. His callouses caught on my skin with every movement now, and I was hard pressed not to notice how rough the rest of his skin was against me. Our coupling had been absent of any calculation from the start, but now it felt like we were both coming completely undone. 

I would’ve thought that I could muster more dignity in bed, but perhaps it was no surprise that McGray was capable of stripping that from me too. I was reduced to the level of an animal, and an incredibly happy animal at that. There was only the movement of our bodies together, the rough desperation pushing us ever higher. I clutched at his back and whimpered, and he groaned and tightened his grip around us. The rest of the world fell away, and I had never been quite so happy to leave it behind.

My orgasm came suddenly, far more intensely than it ever had when I’d been alone in bed with only my own hand for company. I felt my cock jerk in his grip, and then - with a noise embarrassingly like a dying animal, I was coming all over his hand and both of our stomachs. I had thought my world narrow before, but now it shrunk down even further. There was only pleasure and a feeling of incredible lightness, the pleasant feeling of McGray’s big body still moving ceaselessly on top of me as he tried to find his own pleasure.

Luckily for him, and surprisingly for me, it was only a few more seconds until he tumbled over the edge after me. Just as I was starting to come back to myself his entire body tensed above me, and then he gave a rough roar - one that made me decidedly hope that George and Joan were far too sensible to meddle in other people’s business - and I felt more hot come slick out between our joined bodies.

Now done, he collapsed on top of me bonelessly. It should’ve been uncomfortable, it was uncomfortable in a lot of ways, but for once I felt hardly inclined to needle him. Instead I just grasped his back loosely, and allowed myself to pant in time with him. Humiliatingly it appeared that some of his earlier teasing had been on point, I really did feel far more relaxed with my mind emptied of everything but the fantastic orgasm I had just had.

McGray, to my surprise, was the first one to break our not quite embrace. He groaned against my collarbone, and then gently shook my still clutching hands off and pulled back from me. He sat back on his haunches, and gave an indolent stretch that I really should’ve found shameful.

I was rather too tired to lie to myself, at least not to my usual level of expertise. Instead I laid on my back, for once loose limbed, and finally allowed myself to look my fill. Those dark whorls of hair scattered across his naked body, those impressive muscles, the sheer bulk of him dwarfing me even though I was hardly a small man… God, he was delicious. The most handsome man I had ever seen, even if I was hardly inclined to tell him that.

I thought it was all over, that there was only a limited amount of time before the laws of society reasserted themselves and we were left with only bitter awkwardness, but yet again I had underestimated McGray. He stretched for a second more, and then looked down and caught me staring. In the next moment he was leaning down again, scooping me into his arms and lifting me until I was cradled against his chest in a loose limbed embrace.

“So,” he said eventually, when it had become amply clear that I was not about to attempt to wriggle free of his arms.

I tilted my head up against his chest, until I could just about see the corner of his face. This had the side effect of tucking my head comfortably under his chin, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to mind. “So?”

“If yer gonnae have realizations like that every time we go to a club together,” McGray said smugly, and there was such naked happiness in his voice - the kind of naked happiness that I hadn’t seen him indulge in since we’d met - that I couldn’t even begrudge him it. “Then we’re gonnae have to get ye out and about more often.”

“Shut up, Nine Nails,” I informed him, giddily happy myself, and laced my arms tightly around his back.


End file.
